The problem with Muslim celebrity culture

by VANESSA TAYLOR

On April 4, the online platform Muslims of the World announced on its Instagram account a competition to win a ‘free trip to New Zealand’ PHOTO/screenshot/Instagram

Last week, Muslims of the World (MOTW) – a platform describing itself
as “designed to give a voice to Muslims around the world” – launched an
Instagram contest offering a free trip to New Zealand. It claimed the
winner would meet families of Christchurch shooting victims and visit
the mosques with the platform’s founder, Sajjad Shah, Imam Suhaib Webb,
and author Khaled Beydoun – all US-based.

The announcement swiftly provoked a backlash,
including from Maha Elmadani, the daughter of one of the victims, who
wrote, “I don’t know who you think you are but you and your idiot
friends are not welcome to come here and look at us like animals in a
zoo.”

The contest has since been cancelled and Muslims of the World issued
an apology, and so did Beydoun – who deleted his Twitter after the
controversy – and Webb. It is tempting to see all this as a one-time, isolated occurrence – an individual mistake – but it is not. This type of social media-related opportunism has many manifestations and is very much rooted in Muslim celebrity culture and trauma tourism inspired by Orientalist attitudes.

The trend of Muslim figures rising to almost untouchable
celebrity status has been noted in closed circles for some time, but
many have been reluctant to speak out about it on a public platform.

Part of this is due to fear of being ostracised and harassed. Black
Muslim women, for example, have often discussed on private forums how
some celebrity Muslim figures take from their scholarship and silence
them when they speak up.

Muslim celebrity culture very much illustrates problematic
power dynamics of gender and race within the Muslim community that are
rarely addressed. It is not lost on anyone that primarily cis/het,
non-black Muslim men acquire celebrity status at the expense of others
and often assume the position of official commentators on Islam and all
Muslims, regardless of whether they have the expertise or not.

The aftermath of the Christchurch massacre demonstrated this
perfectly. As details of the horrific attack started surfacing, US-based
Muslim celebrities were quick to take centre-stage, drowning out Muslim
voices from New Zealand.
This was not only disrespectful to the Muslim community there, but it
also shifted the focus away from important discussions about the local
context in which the shooting took place.

Many local Muslims, for example, were pushing back
against the narrative that the government was unaware of white
nationalist extremism and threats against them. Members of the Maori
community were also challenging Prime Minister Jacinda Arden’s claim that “this is not New Zealand,” pointing to the country’s bloody colonial history.

In their eagerness to dominate the online discussions after the
attack, some Muslim celebrities went as far inadvertently propagating
misinformation. Under the guise of “humanising the victims”, for
example, Beydoun posted effusively on social media, using what some have claimed to be either wrong or plagiarised information.

It was celebrity Muslim culture that allowed outside voices
like Beydoun to position themselves as owners of the Christchurch
narrative, even when some New Zealand Muslims protested. And it was this
same culture that made him, Shah and Webb feel entitled enough to put
their faces on a poster and advertise a “free trip” to New Zealand.

This entry was posted
on Tuesday, April 30th, 2019 at 00:01 and is filed under Uncategorized.
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